RIM Blackberry 7230

This lightweight device makes it easy to keep in touch on the move.

Price: £199

Manufacturer: T-Mobile

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Verdict

Pros:

Ease of use; triband.

Cons:
Occasionally slow.

Verdict: Simple to use and lightweight, this is a superb device for keeping in touch. However, it is quite slow and time consuming.

Mark Walsh., Personal Computer World 18 Aug 2003

The first edition of the Blackberry came along over 18 months ago and was a purely corporate-orientated device, as it could only be run through dedicated servers that cost over £3,000 a pop. This time around, RIM has chosen to use T-Mobile's GPRS connection to open up this simple email and phone device to the masses. It has also added a colour screen and even the option for a game or two.

Looking like a short, chubby PDA, the Blackberry is still quite light and is operated solely through the jog dial on the right-hand side. You open a program by pressing in the dial, and if there is more than one option, a screen will appear presenting a list of all possible functions.

This can be frustrating at times, particularly to PDA users who are more familiar with a touch screen and a bit more intuition from their handheld.

However, the aim is to keep things as simple as possible, and this is precisely what RIM has done.

The interface is roughly similar to Palm's, in that all programs are listed on a main menu; just scroll to one to open it. Email and text are treated in a very similar way and are even stored in the same place, and there are tone and vibrate options for call and message alerts. The most useful view is in the Mail program: all calls, text and emails are listed in chronological order.

The 7230 can be linked to your PC via USB and contacts, and any other information can be downloaded using Active Sync. RIM is not willing to reveal the clock speed of the Arm processor inside its device, but it is unlikely to be particularly fast, as we found it freezing momentarily when we asked it to perform some basic functions. One other flaw became apparent when we turned it off for as little as a day, and the majority of our emails were bounced back as the server storage space had been exceeded.

Also, the device itself comes with 16MB of storage space and will start to delete the earliest emails automatically unless you tell it to do otherwise.

On the plus side, setting up the device to receive email was very simple - you choose a user name, password and email address and you're ready to go. All phone and email charges are included on one bill: see T-Mobile's website for specific pricing structures.

The Qwerty keyboard is one of the best we've seen on a handheld; the buttons are as large as they can be and raised off the surface just enough to be easy to navigate around. There's also a phone shortcut button on the top, but even with the large keys, we found it quite time consuming to type in a number that is not in the address book, as there are a number of screens you need to go through before you can dial the number. The best advice is to store every number you can think of.

Using it as a phone was a pretty comfortable experience, though we found the earpiece far too small, and it was hard to keep it in the right place when on the move. The screen is hardly special but more than adequate for its needs. Battery life is very good, as it lasted a long weekend away from a charger before it ran out of juice. RIM quotes four hours of talk time; our tests showed it to be close enough to that, although the 10-day standby time is a little generous.

At under £200, the Blackberry is an excellent device that will appeal to those who want a simple way of keeping in touch anywhere, any time. However, it is no speed demon in any sense.

Contact:T-Mobile
www.tmobile.co.uk

Specifications: